THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 6, 2014
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THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 6, 2014
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THE WORLD WE SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN
The clothes, the food, the nickel-coated iron
flower tables, the glass-and-wood-fluted doorknob
but most of all the baby girls holding
chicks in one arm and grapes in the other
just before the murder of the Gypsies
under Tiso the priest, Slovak, Roman Catholic,
no cousin to Andy, he Carpatho-Russian
or most of all Peter Oresick, he of Ford City,
he of Highland Park and East Liberty
Carpatho-Russian too, or just Ruthenian,
me staring at a coconut tree, I swear it,
listening late on a Saturday afternoon
a few weeks before my 88th to
airplane after airplane and reading the trailers
by the underwater lights of yon organ-shaped
squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool
the noise a kind of roar when they got close
I’m watching from the fifth floor up, Warholean
here and there oh mostly on the elevator but
certainly by the pool, his European relatives
basking under his long serrated leaves
tics,” Christie Ewing Rolon, one of
her sorority sisters, said. At the party,
Kelley and Rand talked about Dosto-
yevsky. A year later, at their wedding,
a candlelit ceremony in her home town,
Ron Paul was best man. After a hon-
eymoon on St. Kitts, in the Caribbean,
they moved back to North Carolina,
where Rand finished his ophthalmol-
ogy residency.
Not long after meeting Randy, Kel-
ley told him that his name didn’t seem
appropriate for an adult, and she re-
named him. Carol Paul told me,“When
he and Kelley met, he was a big boy. He
could be Rand.”
In 1993,Rand and Kelley moved to
Bowling Green, Kentucky, to be
closer to her family. He joined the oph-
thalmology practice of John Down-
ing and created Kentucky Taxpayers
United. It was an antitax organization,
modelled on the Young Conservatives
of Texas, which rated legislators on
their fealty to small government. He
learned that the ratings business was an
easy way to get his name into the press.
“There’s kind of a vacuum for it,” he
told me during an interview in Wash-
ington. “Whereas up here there’s hun-
dreds of groups that do ratings, and
they ’re kind of passé. In state capitals,
there aren’t many people who do it.”
Unlike his father, Paul gladly ac-
cepted Medicare and Medicaid, which
eventually accounted for fifty-five per
cent of his patients. In 1994, he and Kel-
ley bought an acre and a half of land and
built a house in a new gated community
called Rivergreen. The Pauls liked the
eighteen-acre man-made Sunfish Lake,
which was stocked with bluegills, but
Rand balked at the twenty-one pages
of restrictions that Rivergreen placed
on homeowners. Only brick, stone, or
stucco houses with at least three thou-
sand square feet of living space were al-
lowed. Gravel driveways, clotheslines,
and piles of firewood visible to neighbors
were forbidden. Aboveground swim-
ming pools were banned. If Paul wanted
to change the style of his mailbox, he
had to get approval from Rivergreen’s
three-member Architectural Commit-
tee. “He didn’t much like that,” Jim
Skaggs, Rivergreen’s developer, told me.
“He said, ‘I bought the property, it’s my
property!’ ” Paul eventually relented, and
built a four-bedroom, red brick Colonial
with an indoor swimming pool.The lib-
ertarian who a few years earlier had
railed against suffocating conformity at
Baylor had settled into a neighborhood
where he wasn’t allowed to choose the
exterior of his own home.
Paul took no interest in the local
party. “I held fund-raisers within four
hundred feet of where he lived and he
didn’t attend,” Skaggs, who is a promi-
nent Republican fund-raiser in Ken-
tucky, said. “He didn’t attend our Lin-
coln Day Dinners and that kind of
thing.” Rand and Kelley, who had three
boys between 1993 and 1999, privately
agreed that he would wait to run for
office until they were in their fifties. He
used his antitax group as a platform to
speak out about political issues, but he
was working on the edges of conserva-
tive politics. John David Dyche, a Ken-
tucky lawyer and longtime Republican
commentator, told me, “He was re-
garded somewhat like his dad was: a
smart guy but maybe a little flaky and a
little too far over to the edge to really
ever get anything done.”
But the national mood was warming
to the Paul family’s politics. In 1978,
Ron Paul’s victory had been facilitated
by a conservative backlash against the
first two years of the Carter Adminis-
tration. The anti-government voices
were more muted during the subse-
quent Republican Presidencies, but
gained volume again in 1993, after the
election of Bill Clinton. The following
year, Republicans won the Senate and,
for the first time in four decades, took
over the House. Ron Paul decided to
run for Congress again, in 1996, telling
a local paper, “My platform is not so
strange anymore.” Rand returned to
Lake Jackson as his father’s campaign
strategist.
It was a good moment for Rand to
take a break from practicing medicine.
Downing and Paul disagreed about how
their practice was run and decided to
part ways. The biggest fight was over
“some differences over charges and taxes,”
Downing told me. “He was a little bit
more interested in avoiding taxes than I
was. And I was afraid he was pushing
things a little bit.” He thought that Paul
“was taking more deductions than was
reasonable.” Paul’s spokesman said, “ The
Senator does not remember the dissolu-
tion of their partnership over a tax issue.”
Rand Paul has the bedside manner
of a surgeon. He is more comfort-
able attacking a cataract or reshaping
the cornea during Lasik surgery than he
is talking to voters. “He’s not naturally
gregarious,” Al Cross, a longtime Ken-
tucky political columnist, said. “He’s not
a natural politician.” Paul is accommo-
dating to reporters but wary of ques-
tions that seem like political traps. Yet
at the mention of his father’s victory in
the 1996 House race he smiled and
loosened up. Paul was thirty-three at
the time. He liked the challenge of the
ferocious primary against the incum-
bent, Greg Laughlin, a Democrat who
had switched parties. The family once
again took on the Republican establish-
ment, which closed ranks around the
party switcher. “He was extra motivated
by the fact that the National Republi-
can Congressional Committee was
against his dad,” Jesse Benton said. “It
was just so outrageous that the N.R .C.C.
was for this former Democrat.”
Several high-profile Republicans
coconuts near the top—ripe and dangerous—
like Peter, coming from one of the villages inside
Pittsburgh, like me, half eastern Poland, half southern
Ukraine born in the Hill, on Wylie Avenue,
the first village east of downtown Pittsburgh,
Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill,
two blocks—at least—a string of small stores and
Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s, I was
born at the end of an era, I hung on with
my fingers then with my nails, Judith Vollmer’s
family was Polish but they were twelve miles away from
Peter’s village, this was a meal at Weinstein’s:
chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then
matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by
roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish
or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw
and Jewish pickles on the side and plates
of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel,
Yiddish the lingua franca, tea in a glass,
the world we should have stayed in, for in America
you burn in one place, then another.
— Gerald Stern
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